Shrines of Gaiety
A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The #1 internationally bestselling, award-winning author of Life after Life transports us to the dazzling London of the Roaring Twenties in a whirlwind tale of corruption, seduction and debts that have come due.
1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.
The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success…
KATE ATKINSON won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. The international sensation Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize and won the Costa Novel Award, a prize Atkinson won again for her subsequent novel, A God in Ruins.